Mental Health Discussion: “The Great Texas Freeze of 2021”

Practicing mindfulness during uncertainty

When I was a teacher, I would read my senior students a graduation speech by American Novelist David Foster Wallace called “This is Water.” It was an incredibly powerful graduation speech, and even though I followed the reading with a discussion of it, I had some doubts about what they were truly taking away from it. See, this was the kind of speech that harmonized various rhetorical, critical, and philosophical theories discussed in my literature classes much like a capstone would. I was aware that the meaning of that speech would be eternally dynamic as my students graduated and went on to make their lives. After all, the books or movies you consumed 10, 15, 20 years ago do not hold the same meaning they did back then. The overall message remains the same, but the journey differs.

In that speech, David Foster Wallace uses a metaphor that could be interpreted as a practice in mindfulness:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

My overall conclusion derived by my analysis of the speech is that everyday adult life has been romanticized in media, and in the process, a harsh reality has been omitted. There are certain aspects of adult life which can be incredibly lonely, boring, and infuriating. In those times when you find yourself alone, bored, and frustrated, you should take a moment to analyze your thoughts. What is the water like in your river of consciousness? Is it clear? Is it murky? Are there rapids, or is the stream calm and serene?

From our education, David Foster Wallace’s suggests, we should develop attention, awareness, and discipline. We should be able to choose how and what to think. There is something incredibly powerful about the idea that you are in control and you have the option to develop and maintain your river, whether it be during a time of tranquility or chaos. Whatever the case, those moments exist because you have allowed them to. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is part of being human.

Beating yourself up for however your river of consciousness looks like at the moment is not going to help. What mindfulness does is allow you to take a moment and look at the river. You may see specific thoughts floating by. Thoughts of missed payments, insecurities over the way you look, or maybe they are fears. There may also be a few positive thoughts in there. You may have thoughts over what an amazing job you did on a presentation at work/school, how you aced a certain project, or maybe a happy memory. The mind naturally wants to hold on to those happy ones and hurriedly pushes the others along.

That is not necessary nor is it healthy. No one is happy 24/7. Emotions, just like our thoughts, come and go. We need to acknowledge what is flowing in and out of our rivers as they are a natural byproduct of our experiences and surroundings. You may gently pick up a thought, reflect on it, then put it back in the river and let it flow away. What we want to avoid is holding on to them like our lives depend on them — even the good ones. It becomes especially challenging after everything has been working out great for us because there is little cleaning to be done in those moments.

Photo by Kyle Cesmat on Unsplash

“Be more positive” is a horrible piece of advice to give someone who seems to always be focused on the negative in their lives. It is not that simple. We are often focused on the negative because there has been so much of it in our world for so long that we have lost sight of the good even though it is there. What we can do is help each other look at our thought patterns, identify cognitive distortions, and reframe those thoughts into something that will be more useful to us — to our water.

Here is one example from last week’s short story:

“Maybe I should have dropped out of school when my house burned and focused on surviving. Instead of learning about feelings, I should have learned to turn my home self-sustainable. I should have invested in solar power, planted vegetables in my garden, and grown chickens.”

For the purpose of creative writing, these sentences are aimed at evoking powerful emotions of compassion and sympathy. By the time you read them, you should be thinking about your loved ones and your own experiences with freezing winters. From the perspective of reflection, however, these should statements may be considered a cognitive distortion that evoke feelings of guilt, shame, disappointment, and anger. These sentences are also highly filtered statements. They focus on the negative and dismiss any good that is dug underneath. It is not easy to stay in school after a major house fire, during a pandemic, and after becoming a parent. There are many students who drop out under similar circumstances. In fact, at least two out of ten in my cohort dropped out because of the pandemic.

Stop sabotaging yourself. Put in the work. Love yourself the way you love others by showing compassion for yourself and giving yourself the time to heal, to grow, and to live.

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